Umberto Boccioni, "Dynamism of a Soccer Player" Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(drum beat music)
Ann: The Italian futurists
were one group of artists
who were doing incredible things in 1913.
Thinking about art as something
that had to be for the new century.
Speed, noise, machinery, and
the city became a key part
of all of their paintings.
Dynamism of a Soccer Player
challenges any viewer
to actually find a soccer player:
two arms, two legs, a face.
No way.
Colors and shapes
moving, running, kicking.
Your eye is brought to the next
place or to a place further down.
There's only one way when you look
at a yellow form or a red form
that you can see that
form which is in relation
to the colors circulating around it.
The brush strokes are extremely
visible, they are tangible its material.
Photography which was little
more than half a century old
had an enormous impact.
Eadweard Muybridge did photography
in sequence: bop, bop, bop, bop.
They wanted to do that in painting too.
The futurists believed
that part of being modern
was not only painting modern
things but creating a ruckus.
When their pictures
appeared at exhibitions
they issued manifestos, they have
lectures, they had performances
that absolutely provoked the people
in attendance to realizing, "Wow."
Even if we didn't understand the picture,
what we're doing is being
a witness to something
that is upsetting centuries of tradition.
(drum beat music)